Chris Gayle, the Jamaican cricketer and former captain of West Indies team, is ‘most dangerous cricketer’ to search in Indian cyberspace.
He is followed by Australian fast bowler Brett Lee and Indian all-rounder S Sreesanth, who has been in the news for spot fixing, according to a study by security technology company McAfee.
Cyber criminals often use the names of popular celebrities to lure people to malicious sites designed to steal passwords and personal information. Fans looking for results on search engines using strings such as ‘name of cricketer’ combined with words like ‘free downloads’, ‘hot pictures’, ‘wallpapers’, and ‘videos’ are at risk of running themselves into malicious sites.
The study - ‘India’s Most Dangerous Cricketer’ - researched this season’s top celebrities of the cricketing world on their risk quotient in the Indian cyberspace.
“Cyber criminals constantly leverage famous personalities and very cleverly time their attacks to coincide with popular events in luring people to websites with malicious software. In the context of the ongoing cricketing leagues, cyber crooks are leveraging famous cricketers for their nefarious gains,” said Venkatasubrahmanyam Krishnapur, Vice-President of Engineering (CMSB), McAfee India Centre.
“During such events, eager cricket crazy fans are highly-motivated to search for photos, videos, score and stories of their favourite cricketers online and in that moment of weakness they are lured into clicking malicious links that puts them at considerable risk,” he added.
Chris Gayle ranks number one with a total of 32 infected search results, while Brett Lee has 31 infected search results to his credit and Sreesanth 30. Yuvraj Singh ranks fourth 29 infected search results.
David Miller ranks fifth (28), followed by South African bowler Dale Steyn (27). The others in the list are Kevin Pietersen and Kieron Pollard (26 each), Mitchell Johnson and Rohit Sharma (25 each) and Virat Kohli (24). Sachin Tendulkar ranks at the bottom of the list at 10th position.